Are you still waiting for a man to rescue you? Except, the men you keep attracting are not the White Knights. Instead they are the reflection of all the ways you doubt yourself and all the parts of you that you don’t believe are ‘good enough’.

You are attracting the Dark Knight; the one who is the epitome of the dark sadness in your soul. Yet you accept his negative behaviours, his emotional abuse, his dismissiveness, his devaluing of you and non-acceptance because you do those things to yourself little by little every day. You don’t believe you’re worth anymore.

And deep down you know this. You know you are the root of the pattern. You probably even have a good idea where it’s come from. Maybe it’s from your childhood and your teens. Maybe your Dad didn’t listen to you, made you feel small. Maybe you never felt you could speak up and instead you focused on being the good girl. Trying to do the ‘right thing’. But you were never easy. People sometimes found you difficult. ‘Why can’t you just ‘get over’ things?’ they’d ask you.

But you never could. Your very unique and capricious soul was marked with discontent of yourself as you tried to be one thing and wanted desperately to be another.

Fast forward and now you’re an adult. But those marks of the past persist and now manifest in your entrenched ‘not good enoughness’. So you attract the same and you accept the same. Your Dark Knight arrives.

The curious thing is the Dark Knight often looks exactly like his White Knight brother. They are, after all, two sides of the same coin because we all, even you, have light and shadow within us. It’s just up to us to manage the shadows and grow the light.

The Dark Knight is just as shiny on the surface. He is just as good-looking and just as attentive (for a moment or two). But soon enough his shadows make themselves known. He doesn’t return calls, belittles you just a little, suggests oh so subtly that maybe you need to change yourself…condense yourself into a box he’s more comfortable with. And you respond in kind, oh so subtly, because it’s more comfortable that way. It’s the pattern you adhere to. It’s your comfortable zone. And your mind is happy there, sort of. Your soul weeps but it often seems like the pain of conformity and the life you’ve lived for so long, is preferable to unhooking your caboose and letting go of someone else’s direction. Far better to conform to their projection.

For the Dark Knight is merely your reflection and you are responsible for your predicament. I know these words seem harsh. I’ve directed them to myself often enough. But I know them to be true. For my boundaries are decided by me and if I don’t put any in place then how does anyone know they’re there?

My heart will still search for love in the Dark Knight because I wish to find it there. I crave it. I see his potential. But therein lies the trick of the light because his potential is mine. He is me. But I must cut him loose in order to allow my light to shine. His shadows are his to manage and he is my reflection. I cannot allow his shadows to suffocate my light. Yet I have done, so many times. So many Dark Knights have galloped in and swept me away and I have loved them. I have given myself unto them willingly. Desperately seeking the light of love that glimmers within them.

But they cannot light the match that ignites my lantern. They will instead snuff it out as they simply do what I do to myself, time and again. I snuff out my own light with my feelings of not being worthy, of not being enough, of not deserving more, of not being heard.

But I am done with the Dark Knights. I cannot carry their shadows any longer. And I know the White Knight can only come unto me when my own light shines brightly; when my own shadows are gently but firmly confined back where they should be.

I must focus on my light. I must be accountable for dealing with my own shadows and sending them on their way, one by one. Only then will I stop attracting the Dark Knights of My Own Soul.

Only then will the White Knight come.

Only then will I be free of the shadows of me.

Only then will I realise, perhaps my White Knight, is me.

Lucretia Ackfield is a writer and transformational teacher who helps women unlock their intuitive power so they can become their own White Knights. For more information about her programs and tips about using your intuition, join her Facebook group Rock Your Inner Channel or visit her Facebook page Lucretia’s Words.